Open Letter to Archbishop Rowan Williams from Jonathan Kuttab

The Most Reverend Rowan Williams

Archbishop of Canterbury

Lambeth Palace

London

SE1 7JU
9th September 2004

Dear Archbishop,

I am writing belatedly in response to the paper you
sent as a contribution to the International Sabeel
Conference held in Jerusalem last April on Challenging
Christian Zionism.

I regret to say that Palestinian Christians attending
the Sabeel Conference listened with profound
disappointment to your keynote address to the
Conference.

Palestinian Christians had suffered much at the hand
of theologies and interpretations of scripture that
provided a mantle of divine legitimisation to the
ideology of Zionism and the political movement that
worked for their displacement from their homeland, and
built a Jewish state on the basis of their exile, and
oppression. One of our constant complaints of was
that Christian Zionism ignores our national rights,
and indeed our very existence. The creation of the
state of Israel was done on our land and the
ingathering of Jews from all the world came at the
price of exiling and scattering our people throughout
the world. All this was supported by Christian
theologies that ignored or delegitimized us as a
people, claiming a divine imperative based on
scripture for the creation of the state of Israel.

Such views generally side-stepped or totally ignored
the Palestinian people on whose land the state was
created. While the Jewish people were seen to hold a
divinely mandated right to people hood, and even
chosen ness, as well as a promise to ownership of the
land, by its creator and ultimate sovereign, the
Palestinian people had only individual and transient
rights, at best, as ‘strangers in the midst’ of God’s
people. These issues were not of passing theological
or academic interest to us, but had direct tangible
consequences for us of life and death, as well as of
faith.

It was therefore most distressing to us to hear these
same views echoed your keynote address when you also
asserted a theological imperative to recognize Jewish
people hood which needed to be exercised in political
statehood in a concrete land inhabited by others whose
people hood is NOT recognized. There were several
references in your lecture to the ‘neighbours’ of
such a state, (presumably Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and
Egypt), but none to the indigenous people of Palestine
who had necessarily to be displaced and marginalized
to make room for the exercise of Jewish nationhood.

It was unclear where the ‘good news’ in this to the
Palestinians, or indeed the Arab neighbours of the new
Jewish state.

To be sure, you did not give unqualified support to
the Jewish state, and affirmed that it is required to
act with ‘law and intelligence’ but one gets the
impression that such a requirement is viewed solely
from the perspective of the dominant Jews themselves,
as if Palestinians have no value in and of themselves
in the sight of God, and that the most they can get,
is the crumbs of the state of Israel’s willingness to
live up to the requirements of ‘justice and
intelligence(?).

However, if Israel fails to live up to those
requirements of justice and intelligence, then the
tragedies , suffering, torture, and displacement
suffered by them would be regrettable,- not because of
what the Palestinian victims are suffering, but more
for what this does to Jews- that is their failure to
live up to their role as God’s people.

Your lecture did not support eschatological or
prophecy-driven interpretations, yet you affirmed,
theologically, the need for a Jewish state as a
necessary paradigm to the world of a community living
‘under God’. You even lamented that we did not have
the benefit of such a living example for almost 2000
years. As you seem to see it Israel, in biblical
terms, is still a gift to the community of nations.

In doing so, you not only bracketed out 2000 years of
history, but also the entire teachings of Jesus and
the New Testament, with respect to the Kingdom of God,
the removal of the barriers of distinction between
Jews and Gentiles, Jesus’ emphatic separation between
Church and State, ( “My kingdom is not of this world”)
which is the basis for the Christians’ critical
attitude towards politics, states and nationalism in
the modern world. The concrete challenges with which
Jesus responded to those zealots who yearned for an
earthly kingdom and the restoration of power to the
Jews, by pointing repeatedly to His Kingdom, which is
open to all and not just to the “children of Abraham,
according to the flesh” are also side-stepped as we
are brought back to the Old Testament covenant of
tribal possession and conquest of the Land.

By utilizing the “tormented meditation in Romans 9-11”
and rejecting the Supersessionist or replacement
approach, you appear to be left with the Old Testament
model of the covenant, tempered perhaps by the
requirements for justice towards the “alien in your
midst” but nothing more. Unfortunately, you were not
present to explain to us what happens to the
indigenous population when such a model state is
established on their land.

What rights, if any, would such indigenous non-Jews
(Christian or Moslem) have in a professedly Jewish
state?

Is discrimination against them (necessary in both
theory and practice if one sets out to create a Jewish
state) legitimate, and divinely mandated?

Is Palestinian nationalism and people hood dangerous,
or even evil because it resists elimination and
marginalization within the divine scheme of creating
the ‘paradigm state’?

Are Palestinians the Amaleks to be exterminated, or
Canaanites to be simply reduced to ‘hewers of wood,
and drawers of water’?

Is their resistance to this scheme legitimate
self-defence, or sinful rebellion against God’s plan
that must be harshly repressed?

Are they ( or the Christians among them) required to
graciously vacate their homes, fields, shops, villages
in favour of Jews to whom God is granting this land to
be their home, since it is obvious that ‘ to be
hospitable, you must have a home’?

I would welcome the opportunity to discuss these
questions with you in person, as and when you are in
Palestine again, or if it is possible to visit you in
London.

On behalf of the indigenous Palestinian Christian
community, I would urge you to give a lead in
challenging the heresy of Christian Zionism which
dares to justify in God’s name, an apartheid regime
that will, if unchecked, lead to a Holy Land devoid of
local Christians within 20 years.



Yours in His Grace,

Jonathan Kuttab

LSN : LIVING STONES NETWORK
An informal network of friends and supporters of the
indigenous Palestinian Christian community drawn from
the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem
http://Jerusalem.anglican.org, Friends of Sabeel
www.sabeel.org, the Living Stones of the Holy Land
Trust www.livingstonesonline.org.uk and the Scottish
Palestinian Forum mortoncc@gn.apc.org. For more
information on these organisations and others
promoting justice and peace in the Middle East check
out www.sabeel.org/links/index.htm. If you wish to
subscribe or unsubscribe to the LSN please reply to
stephen@sizers.org.

"Thus says the Lord God of Israel: You shed blood, yet
you would keep possession on the land? You rely on
your sword, you do abominable things...yet you would
keep possession of the land?... (Ezekiel 33:25-28)